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Medieval Slavic Summer Institute The Ohio State University June 23-July 18, 2008

The Hilandar Research Library (HRL)/Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies (RCMSS) and the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures (DSEELL) at The Ohio State University will host a four-week intensive Summer Institute for qualified graduate students in Columbus, Ohio, June 23-July 18, 2008. The Medieval Slavic Summer Institute (MSSI) will offer: Practical Slavic Palaeography (Slavic 814) and Readings in Church Slavonic (Slavic 812). All lectures will be in English.

Manuscript material on microform from the Hilandar Research Library's extensive holdings forms a large part of the lectures and exercises. Participants will also have the opportunity to work with original manuscripts and to conduct their own individualized research on manuscript collections materials found in the HRL. Also planned is a program of lectures on related topics and other activities.

Applicants must be graduate students with a B.A. degree and with a reading knowledge of Cyrillic and of at least one Slavic language. Preference will be given to applicants with reading knowledge of Old Church Slavonic or some other pre-modern Slavic language.

The Hilandar Research Library, the largest repository of medieval Slavic Cyrillic texts on microform in the world, includes the holdings from over 100 monastic, private, museum, and library collections of twenty-one countries. There are over 5,000 Cyrillic manuscripts on microform in the HRL, as well as over 700 Cyrillic early printed books from prior to 1800 on microform. The holdings range from the eleventh to twentieth centuries, with a particularly strong collection of manuscripts from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. About half of the manuscripts are East Slavic, with much of the remainder South Slavic in provenience.

For further information about the HRL/RCMSS, visit its website at http://cmrs.osu.edu/rcmss/ - see issues of the HRL/RCMSS newsletter, Cyrillic Manuscript Heritage, on the HRL/RCMSS website for an account of MSSI 1999 (issue #6), MSSI 2001 (issue #10), MSSI 2003 (issue #14) and MSSI 2006 (issue #20). The OSU Slavic Department website address is http://slavic.osu.edu/.

For further information on eligibility, credit, housing, financial aid, and to obtain an application to the MSSI, please contact the HRL/RCMSS at hilandarosu.edu or Hilandar Research Library and Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies, 610 Ackerman Road, Columbus, Ohio 43202-4500.

The goal of this workshop is to address empirical and theoretical aspects of scales (or hierarchies), as they are relevant for grammatical phenomena like argument encoding and diatheses (see, e.g., Silverstein 1976, Comrie 1981, Aissen 2003), by bringing together research from typology, grammatical theory, and psycholinguistics.

Organized by Forschergruppe 742 (DFG): Grammar and Processing of Verbal Arguments University of Leipzig MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences www.uni-leipzig.de/~va

Abstract Submission Email to: scalesuni-leipzig.de

Abstracts should be anonymous, no more than one page, in pdf format; 12pt, at least 2cm margins on all sides, for 30 minute talks (40 minute slots). Name, affiliation, and title of the abstract should be included in the body of the email.

Reimbursement: Speakers will be partially reimbursed.

Deadline for abstract submission: January 31, 2008 (Notification of acceptance: February 5, 2007)

Since the discovery of scales (or hierarchies) for grammatical categories in the 70s, many cross-linguistic generalizations have been noted in the functional-typological literature, especially in domains such as person/number marking, argument encoding by case or agreement (Silverstein 1976, Dixon 1979), and diatheses and direction marking (Comrie 1981, DeLancey 1981). The formulation of scales as ''implicational hierarchies'' has enabled researchers in this area to formulate some of the most robust generalizations on language. More recently, the concept of scales has received considerable attention in grammatical theory as well. In particular, the work of Aissen (1999, 2003) has triggered a surge of research occupied with the question of how the effects of scales are related to general principles of morpho-syntactic theory. Also, recent work in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic theorizing has argued for cross-linguistic principles of language processing which employ the notion of a scale. The idea is that scales may help to guide incremental argument interpretation by serving to shape the the interpretive relations than are established between different arguments online (Bornkessel & Schlesewsky 2006).

In this workshop we would like to discuss empirical and theoretical aspects of scales including (but not restricted to) the following.

(i) How well-established is the cross-linguistic evidence for implicational scales? Recently, different potential counter-examples have been discussed (see Filimonova 2005, Haude 2007). The question is especially pressing as the availability of large databases (WALS, TDS) and recent comprehensive field work studies promise a better understanding of the relevant empirical generalizations. Also, is there evidence for new scales that have so far gone unnoticed? And could it be that scales are organized in a meta-hierarchy with respect to each other?

(ii) What is the status of scales in grammatical theory? Are they part of grammar itself (Noyer 1992, Aissen 1999, 2003) or rather epiphenomena? If the latter, are they epiphenomena of (a) functionality or frequency distributions in language use (Bresnan, Dingare & Manning 2001, Newmeyer 2002, Hawkins 2004, Haspelmath 2008), or (b) derivable from other grammatical mechanisms such as feature geometry or/and syntactic movement (Harley & Ritter 2002, Bejar 2003)? What is the relation between feature hierarchies and the order of functional projections in syntax (Cinque 1999, Starke 2001)?

(iii) Which role do scales play in the language processing architecture? Should they be afforded an independent status or can they be viewed as epiphenomena of other information types (e.g., frequency of occurrence)? Is there evidence for the interaction of different scales during language processing and, if so, how does this interaction take place?